I'm a self-taught hobby pianist with small hands, which means that often I need to substitute notes to be able to play something comfortably (or at all).

E.g. in Traumerei, there is a 10-note reach for both hands in the 3rd-to-last bar. At this point in the score it seems (to me at least) that the composer aims for a certain fullness in the chords that seems impossible to get by dropping any of the existing notes. By re-assigning which hand plays which notes (and keeping the top and bottom the same), I came up with the following (which sounds ok to me):

For the second to last bar in Chopin's Prelude in E-minor, the first chord is only an octave, but I haven't found any fingering that isn't painful. The substitution I've made sounds good to me, but is the result of trial-and-error (and I'm not even sure which chord it is..)

Are these substitutions reasonable? Is there any procedure to follow to find substitutions that doesn't involve as much trial-and-error? (after a while everything starts to sound "wrong"..)